We all love a good mess. Familiar faces, ridiculous situations, murder after murder, and the kind of chaos where logic is the first thing to go.
Housefull has always embraced that, and for a long time, we did too.
We are not against chaos or silliness or even cringe. In fact, we enjoy it when a film doesn’t take itself too seriously. We want more films like Housefull 5. But we also want better ways of writing comedy.
Somewhere, the jokes just haven’t evolved. A woman walks into a scene, bends down, the camera follows her body, a man stares, his friend reacts, and the film expects us to laugh. Not because it is clever, but because cleavage on screen is somehow still comedy.
If it is a villain who does this, we call it harassment. But when it is the hero or the “good guys” in the film, we are told it is harmless. Just another moment in a “family entertainer.”
Yes, the women in the film do get lines. They are part of the chaos. But how they are written and how they are framed is still the same. They are looked at before they are heard. Their bodies become the setup, and the men’s reactions become the punchline.
And we sit there, wondering if there were women in the writing room. Were they heard? Or were they told this is just how comedy works?
We do not want to question why actors say yes. Maybe the script felt different. Maybe the edits changed the tone. Maybe this is just what the industry continues to normalise.
But the audience has changed. We have rewatched the comedies we once loved, and somewhere along the way, we started noticing things. We have grown, and so have our ideas of what is funny and what is simply outdated.
This kind of humour, where a woman bending over is enough to carry a whole scene, is not funny anymore. Maybe it never was. It just took us time to learn and unlearn. Now, it feels exhausting. I walked in hoping to laugh. Instead, I left feeling deeply uncomfortable.
That is not to say the film didn’t have moments that were genuinely funny. It did. But it is disappointing to still see objectification passed off as a joke, especially when comedy can be so much more.
There are a hundred ways to make us laugh. Cringe comedy does not have to mean punching down or relying on the male gaze. Comedy can be messy, can be ridiculous, and still be respectful.
And if our first reaction to this is, “It is just a film, people laughed, why overthink it?” then maybe that is exactly the point. Maybe that is where we still need to grow.
